Amazon has moved to upgrade air conditioning machinery at the New Jersey warehouse where an employee died during last summer’s Prime Day scramble. The company insists the death was not heat related and that the upgrades do not amount to any sort of admission of liability. Still, there is no dispute that temperatures in the facility were blistering on that fateful day. The incident tragically spotlights the oppressive and dangerous conditions pervasive in Amazon’s sprawling warehouse compounds, the predictable result of the company’s abusive and dehumanizing business model, predicated on grueling productive quotas that systematically deplete and discard thousands of workers — or, to borrow the company’s dystopian parlance, “industrial athletes.”

In strike news, the Columbus Education Association is set to return to the bargaining table with Columbus City Schools this afternoon following a two-day strike, the union’s first in decades. After last week’s marathon sessions — facilitated by federal mediators — ended absent agreement, nearly 95 percent of the union’s 4,500 members — teachers, librarians, nurses, counselors, psychologists, and other educational professionals — rejected the school board’s offer on Sunday and launched a strike. The union has generally demanded better heating and cooling systems, smaller class sizes, more planning time, and pay raises.

Lastly, in the latest organizing news, nearly 200 workers at a GE plant in Auburn, Alabama filed an election petition on Monday, seeking to join IUE-CWA. While a long and arduous road remains for the unit to secure a collective bargaining agreement, the petition suggests that the nationwide wave of organizing activity may yet penetrate the bitterly antiunion southeast.